GNU Octave Manual Version 3 by John W. Eaton, David Bateman, Søren Hauberg Paperback (6"x9"), 568 pages ISBN 095461206X RRP £24.95 ($39.95) Get a printed copy>>>

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E Installing Octave

Here is the procedure for installing Octave from scratch on a Unix system.

• Run the shell script ‘configure’. This will determine the features your system has (or doesn't have) and create a file named ‘Makefile’ from each of the files named ‘Makefile.in’. Here is a summary of the configure options that are most frequently used when building Octave:

  --prefix=prefix

  Install Octave in subdirectories below prefix. The default value of prefix is ‘/usr/local’.

  --srcdir=dir

  Look for Octave sources in the directory dir.

  --enable-bounds-check

  Enable bounds checking for indexing operators in the internal array classes. This option is primarily used for debugging Octave. Building Octave with this option has a negative impact on performance and is not recommended for general use.

  --enable-64

  This is an experimental option to enable Octave to use 64-bit integers for array dimensions and indexing on 64-bit platforms. You probably don't want to use this option unless you know what you are doing. If you use --enable-64, you must ensure that your Fortran compiler generates code with 8 byte signed INTEGER values, and that your blas and lapack libraries are compiled to use 8 byte signed integers for array dimensions and indexing.

  --enable-shared

  Create shared libraries (this is the default). If you are planning to use the dynamic loading features, you will probably want to use this option. It will make your ‘.oct’ files much smaller and on some systems it may be necessary to build shared libraries in order to use dynamically linked functions. You may also want to build a shared version of libstdc++, if your system doesn't already have one.

  --enable-dl

  Use dlopen and friends to make Octave capable of dynamically linking externally compiled functions (this is the default if --enable-shared is specified). This option only works on systems that actually have these functions. If you plan on using this feature, you should probably also use --enable-shared to reduce the size of your ‘.oct’ files.

  --without-blas

  Compile and use the generic blas and lapack versions included with Octave. By default, configure first looks for blas and lapack matrix libraries on your system, including optimized blas implementations such as the free ATLAS 3.0, as well as vendor-tuned libraries. (The use of an optimized blas will generally result in several-times faster matrix operations.) Only use this option if your system has blas/lapack libraries that cause problems for some reason. You can also use --with-blas=lib to specify a particular blas library -llib that configure doesn't check for automatically.

  --without-ccolamd

  Don't use ccolamd, disable some sparse matrix functionality.

  --without-colamd

  Don't use colamd, disable some sparse matrix functionality.

  --without-curl

  Don't use the cURL, disable the urlread and urlwrite functions.

  --without-cxsparse

  Don't use cxsparse, disable some sparse matrix functionality.

  --without-umfpack

  Don't use umfpack, disable some sparse matrix functionality.

  --without-fftw

  Use the included fftpack library instead of the FFTW library.

  --without-glpk

  Don't use the GLPK library for linear programming.

  --without-hdf5

  Don't use the HDF5 library for reading and writing HDF5 files.

  --without-zlib

  Don't use the zlib library, disable data file compression and support for recent MAT file formats.

  --without-lapack

  Compile and use the generic blas and lapack versions included with Octave. By default, configure first looks for blas and lapack matrix libraries on your system, including optimized blas implementations such as the free ATLAS 3.0, as well as vendor-tuned libraries. (The use of an optimized blas will generally result in several-times faster matrix operations.) Only use this option if your system has blas/lapack libraries that cause problems for some reason. You can also use --with-blas=lib to specify a particular blas library -llib that configure doesn't check for automatically.

  --help

  Print a summary of the options recognized by the configure script.

  See the file ‘INSTALL’ for more information about the command line options used by configure. That file also contains instructions for compiling in a directory other than where the source is located.
• Run make. You will need a recent version of GNU Make. Modifying Octave's makefiles to work with other make programs is probably not worth your time. We recommend you get and compile GNU Make instead. For plotting, you will need to have gnuplot installed on your system. Gnuplot is a command-driven interactive function plotting program. Gnuplot is copyrighted, but freely distributable. The `gnu' in gnuplot is a coincidence--it is not related to the GNU project or the FSF in any but the most peripheral sense. To compile Octave, you will need a recent version of GNU Make. You will also need a recent version of g++ or other ANSI C++ compiler. You will also need a Fortran 77 compiler or f2c. If you use f2c, you will need a script like fort77 that works like a normal Fortran compiler by combining f2c with your C compiler in a single script. If you plan to modify the parser you will also need GNU bison and flex. If you modify the documentation, you will need GNU Texinfo, along with the patch for the makeinfo program that is distributed with Octave. GNU Make, gcc, and libstdc++, gnuplot, bison, flex, and Texinfo are all available from many anonymous ftp archives. The primary site is ftp.gnu.org, but it is often very busy. A list of sites that mirror the software on ftp.gnu.org is available by anonymous ftp from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/GNUinfo/FTP. You will need about 925 megabytes of disk storage to work with when building Octave from source (considerably less if you don't compile with debugging symbols). To do that, use the command

  make CFLAGS=-O CXXFLAGS=-O LDFLAGS=
  

  instead of just ‘make’.
• If you encounter errors while compiling Octave, first check the list of known problems below to see if there is a workaround or solution for your problem. If not, see appendix D Known Causes of Trouble, for information about how to report bugs.
• Once you have successfully compiled Octave, run ‘make install’. This will install a copy of Octave, its libraries, and its documentation in the destination directory. As distributed, Octave is installed in the following directories. In the table below, prefix defaults to ‘/usr/local’, version stands for the current version number of the interpreter, and arch is the type of computer on which Octave is installed (for example, ‘i586-unknown-gnu’).

  ‘prefix/bin’

  Octave and other binaries that people will want to run directly.

  ‘prefix/lib’

  Libraries like libcruft.a and liboctave.a.

  ‘prefix/share’

  Architecture-independent data files.

  ‘prefix/include/octave’

  Include files distributed with Octave.

  ‘prefix/man/man1’

  Unix-style man pages describing Octave.

  ‘prefix/info’

  Info files describing Octave.

  ‘prefix/share/octave/version/m’

  Function files distributed with Octave. This includes the Octave version, so that multiple versions of Octave may be installed at the same time.

  ‘prefix/lib/octave/version/exec/arch’

  Executables to be run by Octave rather than the user.

  ‘prefix/lib/octave/version/oct/arch’

  Object files that will be dynamically loaded.

  ‘prefix/share/octave/version/imagelib’

  Image files that are distributed with Octave.